MOVIE REVIEW: No love for 'The Other Woman'

Director Nick Cassavetes and first-time screenwriter Melissa Stark aren't aiming for the semi-intelligent. kowtowing to the folks who frequent the creme de la crap of TV sitcoms. Even they will find the laughs scarce, as a trio of females, all duped by the same cad, implausibly bond and conspire to bring the three-timing creep to his knees.

Somebody really needs to check Nick Cassavetes’ DNA. I say this because I cannot believe a director helming a comedy as dumb as “The Other Woman” could possibly be the son of the late, great John Cassavetes.

I swear I detected a subterranean rumble throughout, no doubt caused by Dad rolling over in his grave in response to each passing pratfall, poop joke and preposterous plot twist in a film that celebrates women by portraying them as complete ditzes. This from the son of the man and woman (Gena Rowlands) who picked up Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Actress for the 1974 indie classic “A Woman Under the Influence?” Say it ain’t so!

Ah, but it is – regrettably – so. And no human with half a brain will find it funny. But then Cassavetes and first-time screenwriter Melissa Stark aren’t aiming for the semi-intelligent. They’re kowtowing to the folks who frequent the creme de la crap of TV sitcoms. Even they will find the laughs scarce, as a trio of females, all duped by the same cad (a slumming Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from “Game of Thrones”), implausibly bond and conspire to bring the three-timing creep to his knees.

I suspect Stark, whose unpublished screenplays include the charmingly titled “I Want to ---- Your Sister,” wrote something much darker than the vanilla sludge refined by profit-minded studio marketers into a treacly feel-good goop. The result is a “First Wives Club” knockoff that makes that overrated 1996 trifle look like “War and Peace.” At least that movie gave us three bonafide comedians in Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler. “The Other Woman” presents us with the significantly less talented Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and S.I. model Kate Upton, who’d be wise to leave acting to the professionals going forward. How their characters come together is a depressing exercise in high-concept.

It begins with Diaz’s powerful attorney, Carly, thinking at 41 she’s finally found the man of her dreams in Coster-Waldau’s Mark, a stinking rich New York business exec with a sleek sports car and multi-million-dollar smile. But an impromptu visit to Mark’s Connecticut mansion ends in heartbreak when his wife, Kate (Mann, at her whiny, annoying worst), answers the door and immediately shatters his carefully crafted cover. Instead of the usual fisticuffs (those come later), the two wronged women quickly become buddies, with Carly imploring Kate to make sure she has “all her ducks in a row” before she files for divorce. The duck lining leads to bits of amateur espionage (accompanied, of course, by the “Mission: Impossible” theme) and a plethora of poop jokes dumped on us by both dogs and people. The human waste intensifies with the arrival of Upton and her feeble stabs at acting. No wonder they clad her Amber, who is also sharing a bed with Mark, in the briefest of bikinis to deflect attention from her halting voice. Naturally, Amber eventually sparks a catfight (always a welcome sight in a feminist-themed movie) between Carly and Kate, a seaside brawl Amber is forced to break up before she too is instantly welcomed into the I-hate-Mark club.

Page 2 of 2 - From that point on, it’s strictly downhill, as the film devolves into little more than a high-end travelogue culminating with a climactic trip to the Bahamas that ends exactly as you thought it would with Mark falling flat on his arse in a pile of glass. It’s at that point that we’re expected to cheer for the film’s twisted ode to female empowerment. But all I could do was sit in stunned silence feeling every bit as defeated as Mark. But the real looser her is Cassavetes, whose only reward is in marring the family name.